Yesterday, in Kingsport, Tennessee, it happened. The thing that will make gun fellaters ejaculate all over their ammo stash. A "good guy" with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun. You're gonna hear about this endlessly as gleeful NRA stooges crow about how a man walked into a dentist's office and shot and killed his wife, who worked there, and a patient who had a concealed carry permit shot the man, who is currently in the hospital.
I put "good guy" in quotation marks because I don't know anything about the patient. He might have parts of children buried in his backyard. But, hey, in the scheme of things, no one's gonna be upset that an abusive man was taken down, although I'm sure we're gonna find there had been reports of domestic violence, and the shame is that we don't take guns away from those assholes fast enough, if at all. Thank the NRA for that.
In the last 24 hours or so, in this America the NRA has helped create:
In New Orleans, a 9 year-old boy was shot in the head when he was playing with an 18 year-old cousin's handgun. The gun went off when the older cousin tried to get the gun away from the boy, killing him.
In Glynn, Louisiana, a woman was killed in a drive-by shooting. The woman was pregnant and was in her bed when someone fired into her home.
In Garner, North Carolina, a man walked into a Walgreen's and shot two employees because he was upset at the service he had received.
At a mall in Norfolk, Virginia, a fight escalated to a shoot-out that left two male teenagers wounded.
In Evans, Georgia, a woman shot and killed her violent boyfriend in self-defense.
In Raefield, North Carolina, a man shot his wife after hitting her with his car in a domestic violence incident.
In Washington, DC, a man walked into a day labor office and opened fire, killing one and injuring another, before fleeing on foot.
In Phoenix, Arizona, a man shot and killed a man he was attempting to rob outside a McDonald's.
In Chicago, someone opened fire near the Kennedy Expressway, striking a man and a woman.
In Peoria, Illinois, a man broke into a house and started shooting, killing a woman before apparently killing himself.
At a Dress for Less in St. Louis, Missouri, two men opened fire, shooting 20-30 rounds, wounding a man they were likely trying to rob.
In Tuscumbia, Alabama, one man was shot dead and found in the woods, another was shot dead in his car and another man was injured in his car.
Where do you want to go next? Birmingham? Augusta? Lubbock? Baton Rouge? Knoxville? Chubbock, Idaho? Denver? Opa-locka, Florida? Wherever you'd like to go, whatever commonplace store or restaurant, in the last 24 hours or so, you'll find someone being shot. You can bet that some of those doing the shooting think they're the good guys. And this isn't even getting into the suicides.
On the one-year anniversary of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, we're talking about the president declaring a national emergency for a fantasy crisis at the border. But, as Nancy Pelosi and so many others have said today, the real emergency is our unending gun fetish in the United States.
I'd go a step further. The problem is men with guns. The only story I found of a woman doing the shooting was the self-defense case in Georgia. Otherwise it was always, always men, too often using their guns to murder women, the sad end of so many domestic violence cases.
The number of firearms that have been amassed in this country are an emergency. But let's be clear: men are the primary perpetrators of gun violence. (Yes, women shoot people, too. I'm not saying that they don't.)
If you're gonna address guns, you have to address toxic masculinity that finds its outlet with guns. (Insert your own Freudian joke there.) We're gonna have to come up with a way to deal with the fact that there are a whole lot of men who only feel they have power because they own a gun, that they have been told the gun is the only power they possess.
Otherwise, every violent day will continue to be like every other violent day, a thrum of death and wounding that we barely hear anymore, punctuated by horrors like Parkland that shake us, briefly, until we rationalize them into the loud drone of American violence.
